Some time ago, Michael Ruhlman lent me a book by Chef Dan Barber called The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food. It took me a long time to get through the book, primarily because it made me think so hard that I could read barely one chapter at a time. In 2009, the same year I started writing Your Health is on Your Plate, TIME Magazine named Dan Barber as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Third Plate got me thinking about the fact that mainstream America survives not on nutritious food but, instead, on a commodity-based diet. When goods and services are traded on the grand scale for other goods and services, they become commodities. The primary characteristic of a commodity is that its price is determined not by quality but, rather, quantity. A commodity meets explicit contractual requirements unrelated to the product’s nutritive value or taste, so that the source and nutritional quality of the product become, essentially, irrelevant. Commodities from different producers are of more-or-less uniform quality and, therefore, considered equivalent. Food-based commodities include white flour, sugar, soybean oil, degerminated corn meal, corn syrup, and corn starch. Other kinds of commodities include coal, gold, silver, iron ore, and aluminum. Continue reading →